I get the real feeling once assets start being seized, Reality is going to Bitch-Slap him and he’s going to lose his tiny mind and go out in a swirl of ignominy.
Swirl. Tee Hee 
Yep, and, no longer the “billionaire,” he will be abased before his worshipers, and the L will be oh so large…
This will likely result in him losing his grip more every day but I doubt it will change anything about how the MAGA base feel about him. And given that he now owns the RNC I don’t see it hindering him getting the nomination.
It will scare away most independents but that’s about it.
Fair enough. Apologies.
He will have to either bow out or be bought out at this point.
The extreme pressure on his already weakened physical state makes the former more likely, while the same on his financial state makes the latter more likely.
Yes, it will them away in all races. The GOP pols (the non-true MAGA believers) and their oligarchic financiers are going to see that they are about to waste a fortune on an absolutely catastrophic loss up and down the ballot. If they are going to spend that much on the election anyway, they might as well buy Trump out, get rid of him, and stanch the bleeding as much as possible.
The above kos article says that both small and mega-large donors are already abandoning him, which I find amazing.
The thing with that is that he surely is at the same time shopping around for someone to buy him in so as to keep disrupting the system. And knowing him, the people able to buy him “out” may not trust he could stay bought out.
Buying him “out”, which is to say, “Donnie, m’man, I can help you fight for and keep your fortune, but you’re going to have to say you need to drop out to focus on fighting this injustice” , requires making it so you’re sure to bind him to that he quits first, and gets to the point of not being able to come back in BEFORE you put up any cash.
Your points are good.
One thing that mitigates the fear that he won’t stay bought out is that they, like you and me, know that Trump will be in no shape to run in 2028, if he is alive at all.
I think the No. 1 reason that Trump would fight a buyout is his hope that he can win and then pardon himself. So any pitch would need to take this into consideration. I think it might go like this (imagine them using more polite language than I will here):
- You’re financially fucked. As you are stripped of your assets to pay the judgments, you are going to look like an L to your base and independents. You are going to lose anyway, so the hope of being pardoned by yourself is currently zero. But we can offer you hope.
- If you bow out now, we are going to pay all of your legal bills and judgments.
- Further, we can make Republican X the candidate, who has agreed to pardon you for all federal crimes. We will also fight like hell legally on the state charges to ensure that you do no time.
- A condition of the deal is that you endorse this candidate and keep your goddamn mouth shut for the next four years, whether s/he wins or not. If you want to run again in 2028, that’s fine with us.
- If you don’t take this deal, we have the following Republicans and major donors ready to come out against you and ensure that you don’t win. We will also support a Nikki Haley third-party run. So it’s either take the deal and be far better off than you are now, or be fucked with ourselves as a major fucker of you.
- Which do you choose, “Mr. President”?!
Not physically possible for Trump to do this.
I don’t think they’d be able to assemble this list. Or that the MAGA folks would listen.
Yes, let’s not underestimate the depth of physical and moral cowardice of the “establishment” plutocrats. Sure, Koch and others stood with Haley but that did not work. If faced with that kind pf pressure Trump could just immediately threaten to “out” them all as blackmailing him, branding them as turncoats and exposing them to reprisals both economic and personally physical.
The imminent collapse of Trump’s candidacy has been predicted without fail since 2015/16 with every controversy. Yet it has never happened and isn’t happening now. The GOP establishment, such as it is, is still tripping over themselves to do his bidding out of fear that the MAGA base will turn on them. These people will do anything they have to in order to avoid losing their seats in Congress. They will only dump him if/when it becomes clear supporting DJT will cost them elections. That may well happen in November 2024 but until it happens they will stick with him no matter what. The MAGA voters are too dimwitted and too emotionally invested in DJT to dump him at this point and they are the dominant force that turns up at the polls on Election Day for the GOP.
The idea DJT would drop out is deeply unrealistic. Narcissists don’t fold that easily.
And I apologize for being unnecessarily flippant in some of my responses.
To address the substance here, one of the reasons I don’t take much comfort in Trump’s campaign funding travails is the absolute ocean of dark money that is going to be spent on his behalf. With the House on a knife’s edge and Republicans in excellent position to take the Senate, establishment Republicans can’t afford for Trump to drag them all down with a disastrous showing. Big money interests will spend heavily to prop him up if only to ensure that Biden doesn’t have an unhindered opportunity to pass progressive legislation or appoint judges and regulators hostile to their interest.
Nothing in the last few weeks has changed the reality that someone stated upthread (paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to go back and look):
Even if Trump’s candidacy leads to a blue tsunami, the GOP can live with that. They suffered one in 2008 and came back strong just two years later.
But stopping Trump from being the candidate (if it could be done at all) would fracture the party like never before. It could be fatal. They’d rather take the L and move on than risk permanent damage.
The Republican party is already broken. The Republican majority House is dysfunctional. The Republicans turned against their own at the behest of Donald Trump to tank an immigration bill they wanted. The Republicans are a group of performance artists masqurading as legislators.
As another Doper described it, what we have now is MAGA wearing the skin of the former Republican party.
It’s broken from the POV of responsible, intelligent citizens like us, insofar as it can’t accomplish anything in terms of governing, but it still controls the Supreme Court, the US House and a majority of statehouses. It may even regain the Senate and the White House this year.
By “fracture[d] … like never before,” I meant a party stripped of significant power and lacking the ability to regain it.
It’s like the difference between a gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing pickup truck roaring down the highway, and that same truck with a few blown rods, no transmission and four flat tires.
It would be the first time, for sure.
It would take extreme circumstances, but we’re getting there.
They wouldn’t, but Trump can’t win with MAGA alone. It’s about swaying “independents.”
At least their money going to the Orange One is way down now, per the cite above.
He hasn’t threatened any donors yet who have failed to support him (that we know of).
They in turn could reveal those communications from Trump to the public, especially any threats of violence. The fighting could get very, very dirty.
That is my point exactly, though. He has cost them elections–lost of them. In 2020, he himself lost and he personally lost the Senate for the GOP through his fuckery in Georgia. His fucking around with candidates and the unpopularity of MAGA overall crushed the predicted Red Wave in 2022. Special elections and off-cycle elections have been shit for the GOP.
Some are not already. Ken Buck quit the House, and there has been a flood of GOP retirees over the past few years. There is currently a GOP civil war in the House.
They can’t win with their base alone. They have to build new voters beyond what they had in 2020, or they lose again.
He is broke, sick, and demented. The times have changed.
Thanks, I know your politics now, so I won’t make the same mistake in the future!
But… when do they start spending? He has “travails” now, really big ones, so wouldn’t it be smart to be spending that already before more damage to his image is done? The timing seems quite off.
Exactly!
So one strategy is to prop him up, as you say, but the danger there is that he is becoming unproppable. This isn’t a Dole or a Romney who will at least seem like a respectable human as they lose. This is someone who does massive damage to everyone as he goes down. So they can spend their money on keeping him in–or on getting him out. There is no fucking way the latter isn’t the better move,* but question is whether there are enough smart and gutsy people to do it. The worse things get, the more likely they are to appear.
*Unless he actually wins. But the big money people are also smart enough to see that their interests are in danger in the chaos that would ensue if Trump were to win a second term.